


Nocturne (Pro Fratre)

by Ariadne_Dai



Series: Lies and Love in the Mushroom Kingdom [2]
Category: Luigi's Mansion (2001), Super Mario Bros.
Genre: Brotherhood, Darkness, Gen, Ghosts, Luigi's Mansion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 18:29:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/701305
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariadne_Dai/pseuds/Ariadne_Dai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The story of a mansion full of ghosts, a lost brother, and a man fighting against the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nocturne (Pro Fratre)

The key turns in the latch. I’m in.

I let the door creak open, real slowly. It’s dark in there, like always, and like always, I’m waiting for something to jump out at me. I sweep my flashlight beam across the floor and there’s nothing, only some dust drifting along the floor, caught in the light like it’s trying to hide. I know I shouldn’t let my guard down, though. I’ve learned that the hard way.

I step into the darkness, and I’m looking around, my breath heavy, my nerves on edge. And then the moment I’ve turned my back, something blue leaps out at me from the inside of the old piano that’s been decaying there in the corner. The ghost is on me before I can even make a sound, and all of a sudden he’s clamped on, grabbing at my face with his long fingers, pulling on my hair, tugging at my pockets for loose change, laughing his deep, booming laugh, his hoary yellow eyes staring into mine—

Shit shit shit shit SHIT—

Frantic, I make a strangled noise and try to pull him off me, but his long, droopy arms are too fast to catch, and the two of us are wrestling and twisting around the room until finally we’re at the old piano, and with a terrible noise, a jangling smash of notes, we crash into the keys, and at last he slides off me. I seize my chance and leap to my feet. I dash out the door and slam it behind me, hearing his mocking laughter all the way out. I lean back against the door, panting.

Goddamn it.

My heart’s thudding in my chest and my palms are sweaty as hell. I take my gloves off for a moment and wipe my hands off on my knees. That was too close. Too damn close for my liking. I try to breathe, to relax. I can’t stand this place. I hate the darkness, the creeping dread, the knowledge that there’s always something lurking around the next corner. Most of all, I hate the ghosts.

I don’t want to go back in there. And for a moment, I entertain the thought that I won’t. Oh, but even the moment I start thinking about it I know I’m lying to myself. No, I’m going to go back in there in a few moments, once the shock wears off and I’ve spent enough time in the light. I’m going to march back in there, despite my fears, fight whatever’s lurking, get the power to the room running again, and do the same damn thing in every single room in this place until it’s filled up with light and the darkness is scoured away forever.

I have to. My brother’s lost somewhere in this place, wandering through this twisting labyrinth of dark rooms and haunted corridors. I have to find him. I have to set him free.

You know, the earliest memory I can recall? It’s of running away. How fitting is that, right? I’m a coward and I know it down to my bones. And I always was.

Not that I didn’t have things worth running from.

I think back, and I’m running, running, running, from a pack of older kids, with nasty expressions, greasy, uncombed hair, and dirt all over their faces. I’m running down the street like I think I’m about to start flying, but the truth is, I’m earthbound, and I don’t want to know what’ll happen when they catch me. 

But I’m a klutz, and I trip as I’m trying to get up onto the sidewalk, and while I’m down on the cement with scraped hands, they surround me.

“We don’t like you, assface,” one of them says—and does it really matter who? “This is where we live, not you, hear? You and that buncha dirty Catholics you call a family should just get back on the boat and go back where you came from.”

“Oh yeah,” adds another, “but you ain’t even got a dad anymore, do you, assface? Nah, now it’s just you and your ma, ‘cause your dad ran off with a prettier girl and left her all alone, ha ha—”

I’m starting to cry, and I hate myself for it, but the tears are flowing. They notice, and start jeering: “Crybaby, crybaby, mama’s boy—”

And then a familiar voice cuts through theirs. “Leave him alone.” They fall silent and stare. I look up, and it’s him. My brother.

He was always interested in saving things. He started off by saving me.

“Get lost, assholes,” my older brother says. “Scram before I make alla you wish you were never born.” He stares them down.

One of them tries, uncertainly, to swing a fist in his direction, but he dodges it and comes back with a blow to the nose. The kid stumbles back, clutching his bleeding nose. The rest back off, and all of a sudden, they’ve fled down the alleyway.

“Thanks, bro,” I say, looking up at him.

He just nods and smiles, like it’s no big deal. And he doesn’t say anything more to me, that time. We just walk home together. It’s only later, when I’m older, and the same thing keeps happening, that he gets frustrated. After another one of these fights, this time with my face already bruised and blackened, he picks me up from the ground, and fixes me with a stare.

“Listen, this has to stop happening, okay?” he says. “It worries Mama to see you all beat up like that.” I give him a helpless look. What am I supposed to do?

He sighs. “Listen, bro, I know you’re scared. But you can’t just keep running away from ‘em like that. That’s what they want, cause then all they have to do is chase you. That’s how they win. You have to show ‘em that you’re not afraid. You have to stand and fight. Then they’re the ones who’re afraid. You understand?”

I did understand. And in time—not then—but within a few years, I’d learned how to stand my ground. How to fight. And one day the bullies weren’t a problem anymore.

All right, I think, standing up. Time to go back in there. I know I can do this. I’ve done it before. You taught me how. You were always saving me. Now it’s my turn.

Besides, I didn’t come all this way without being armed for the task.

I guess the two of us shoulda known that something was fishy when we got a letter in the mail saying we’d inherited some rich guy’s old mansion. Not that my brother doesn’t get a lot of gifts these days. But now that I look back on it, it might have been one of our enemies who slipped that one in the mail. Between the two of us, we’ve made a few.

So my brother, he got this thoughtful look on his face and told me he was going to head over and check the place out. Fine, I told him. So the afternoon slipped on into evening, and day turned into night. And days passed, and he didn’t return. 

His girlfriend approached me with this strange look on her face: everyone had been asking the two of us where he was, and all either of us could tell them was that we didn’t know. So we talked for a while, finally deciding I should go after him and report back. Maybe he’d just decided to fix the place up—he had a way with repairs, after all—and gotten lost in his work. He was that sort of guy.

By the time I saw the mansion, the sun was setting, and the bare winter trees were casting long, tangled shadows on the path. The house itself was high up on a hill, rising over the landscape like some kind of blister. It was a huge, hoary old building, with rows and rows of arched windows lining the front, and twisting, leering gargoyles all along the corners. And it was all a pale, mossy green. I squinted—had somebody actually painted the building that color, or was it just mold and grime from years of neglect?  Either way, it didn’t look promising.

It was dark when I reached the door. From here, the mansion loomed over me, and I tried to ignore the sinking feeling in my chest. I hadn’t seen my brother anywhere on the grounds, and somehow I didn’t think I’d find him waiting in the foyer. Grimacing, I took the spare key out of my pocket and turned it in the lock.

Nothing prepared me for what was on the other side of that door.

Ghosts. Ghosts everywhere. Swooping through the air, crowding the hall. Flying down the staircases, spinning round the chandeliers. Gibbering like lunatics and shrieking like sirens. Wraiths with screaming mouths and twisted claws, skeletons with bits of flesh clinging to their faces, spectral maidens drifting along in ruined nightgowns. A more chilling menagerie of horrors than I’d seen on any Halloween. But all too real.

I froze, the door half-open, and stared. And in the same moment they noticed me. The ghosts stopped where they were, turned to look at me, and began to laugh. Then they leapt.

I ran, of course, like the coward I am. I ran out of the mansion as fast as my legs could take me. Running, running, in absolute quivering fear, not even thinking about the brother I was leaving behind. All I could think was that I had to get away, away, away, away—

Lucky for me that I nearly collided with an old man coming the other way.

The old professor helped me up, calmed me down, and offered me a cup of tea. I walked with him to his makeshift workshop—more of a shack, really—on the edge of the forest, and I listened what he had to say. Turned out he was a scientist, of sorts, investigating unusual phenomena, and he’d come here to study the ghosts. I told him about my brother’s disappearance, and he vowed to lend the fruits of his research to the task in any way he could. Together we hunched over a table covered in diagrams and formulae and coffee mugs, and between the two of us we worked out a way to fight the dead.

That’s how I came to be here in the mansion once more, with a flashlight in my hand and the heavily altered remains of half an old vacuum cleaner on my back.

See, what the Professor realized is that ghosts aren’t just impossibilities , like nightmares brought to life. (I didn’t tell him that had sure as hell been what I’d thought.) They’re things you can measure with science. They have properties, tendencies, substances. And if you’re clever, you can take advantage of that.

The professor thinks, even, that ghosts might be some form of life, one that we don’t know how to recognize yet, a kind of parasite that steals the faces of the deceased. Me, I don’t know that I’d be able to answer that for sure. They sure as hell seem like dead, creeping things to me, and there’s nothing they do that doesn’t seem straight out of some ghost story I heard in a dark room as a kid. Does it matter? They scare the shit out of me either way.

But I’ve still gotta go back in there. All right. Here goes nothing. I take a deep breath. Turn the key again. Then, armed with vacuum nozzle in one hand, flashlight in the other, I push open the door.

No sign of anything supernatural: they’ve all vanished. That’s no surprise by now. The ghosts are capricious bastards, and they like to play games with your head. They’ll appear without warning and disappear a moment later. They’ll lock doors you’ve opened and make fake doors appear on the walls. And when they want to be gone, they’re gone.

That’s why we can’t operate except at night. The one time we went up here in the daytime, all we found was a grassy knoll. The mansion was gone. Somehow they’d dragged it down to hell—or wherever—with them.

So that’s how our lives go, now. Sleep and wake up with the dead. Join the monsters in the dark, and make them pay. If we can.

My beam sweeps over the broken instruments, the moldy bookshelves, the rotting carpet. This might have been a lovely place, once. There was probably a family here, living an ordinary life, until they died—disease, maybe—and ghosts took their place. I wish I could have met them somehow, seen this place in its prime. I think it could have been beautiful.

It was my brother who taught me to see the beauty in things.  He’d point up at the sky, and I’d glimpse a flock of birds making their way over the city, or a cluster of clouds drifting in to deliver some rain. Things other kids might have laughed at. Not us. Together we’d stare at the glittering skyscrapers that rose over the city, taken in by the grandeur of human architecture and ambition. Once, he stopped me as I was about to turn the corner on a busy street, and gestured down at the ground.

It was a flower, growing out of a crack in the sidewalk. Just a little red flash against the grey of the rest of the city, but it was enough. Enough to change the day, to make a small miracle where there hadn’t been one before.

“Look at that,” my brother said in awe. “How can it do that? How can it grow there?” I didn’t know, and neither did he. But we knelt next to it and looked at it for a long time, wondering how green leaves and a green stem could sprout from asphalt and cement. We debated trying to take it home, but in the end, we left it there, so we could come back and see it growing later, a testament to something natural, something real, in the heart of the concrete jungle.

A chill runs down my spine as I think of him now: locked in some cellar, wasting away, or wandering some endless corridor. He won’t have seen the sun in weeks. But I have to believe he’s still alive. He’s here somewhere, I know it. He has to be.

I listen, very carefully, to the silence. The mansion creaks and cracks with the weight of a breathing thing. And then I hear it: a rustle behind me. A sound like a heavy breath.

I spin about, flashlight in hand, and there he is: the ghost who tried to grab me earlier. I leap back just as he’s about to lunge at me, and he goes flying into the bookshelf behind me. For a moment, he’s disappeared—then his disembodied head leers out at me from the wall of tattered old covers. Rotting jaw agape, he stretches out to take another swipe at me. But this time I’m ready for him.

I swing my beam of light like a sword, and it connects right with his bloodshot eyes. The ghost squeals like a piglet and rears back in pain. _Don’t like that, do you?_ I think, with grim satisfaction. That’s one thing we’ve learned about these ghosts: light’s like poison to them. That’s why they have to stalk the night.

He’s stunned. Now’s my chance. I rev up the vacuum and aim the nozzle firmly at the cringing ghost. With a high-pitched whine, pages and papers scatter about as he’s caught in its wake. Pulled backward, he howls and begins to thrash about to break free. Here’s the hard part. The ghost throws himself around the room, this way and that, screaming all the time, and I have to pin him down. I wrestle with him once more, pulled about the room, stumbling over discarded boxes and toys, gripping the nozzle for dear life. I feel like it’s about to break, but I keep holding on, gritting my teeth. And at last, with one final gasp of dismay, the ghost is pulled down the throat of the nozzle and into containment. The pack on my back shakes with the delivery. The professor will know what to do with his ectoplasm.

I breathe a sigh of relief. So much for this room.

And then, without warning, I’m surrounded. Oh god. Three more ghosts come out of the walls, gibbering madly with their crooked teeth, stretching out their rubbery arms to grab me. I’m frozen there, terrified, as they draw near. I’m quaking on my legs—they’ve turned to jelly. Someone, anyone, get me out of here. All I want to do is run away.

But I know I can’t. And I know I won’t. You taught me better than that.

My brother was never a perfect man. He could be hard, sometimes, stubborn and close-minded. He wasn’t always good with his money, and I’d seen him obsess, even turn cruel, over the women who loved him. But he was wiser than I ever was. When I was in darkness, he pulled me right out. Because even when I’d learned how to fight the bullies, I still kept running away.

After our mother died, I threw myself into feeling nothing. I was running away from life itself. I wanted to forget our poverty, our foreignness, my own pain. I drank myself into oblivion and lived from pretty girl to pretty girl. I’d wake up in strange houses and beds, not knowing how I’d spent the night or who I’d spent it with. I threw responsibility to the wind. The world dissolved into an indistinguishable blur. But at least I didn’t have to see things clearly.

And then one day, I woke up in my own bed, with my brother standing over me.

“Where were you last night, huh?” he demanded.

“I don’t know…” I muttered. “Some party. Why do you even care?”

He seized me by the shoulders and shook me. “I asked you a question! You don’t even remember, do you?” 

I stared at him, helplessly. 

“I told you I was gonna be late at the shop, but I wanted to see you before you left. You said okay. I drop by, and you’re gone. Vanished without a trace. I panic. Searched the whole neighborhood for you. You wanna know where I finally found you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Lying down in the street, with a glazed look in your eyes and vomit all over your clothes!” he roared. “What am I supposed to do, huh? Let you die on the street? Go out and get yourself killed by some thug in a drunk haze? Get your ass locked up in jail? You think that’s okay?” His eyes were full of pain. “You think our mama would have wanted any of that?”

I couldn’t meet his eyes.

“And these,” he growled. He pulled out a shoebox full of drugs I’d been keeping under my bed. “How long did you think it was gonna take before I found this shit? What if you’d died from this stuff, and there’d been no one around to help you? How do you think I’d feel?”

I tried to answer, but I couldn’t.

He sighed. “Listen, you go where you want in life, find whatever kind of work you want, marry whoever you want. That’s fine. But I’ll be damned if I let you do this to yourself.” He looked thoughtful. “Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m gonna take this—” He snatched up the box before I could grab it. “And I’m gonna get rid of it. And then I’m gonna be staying here a while, while you get over the shit you’ve been putting into your system.”

He locked his eyes on mine. “And then you’re gonna make something of your life. Clear?” I looked into his blazing eyes. Swallowed, and nodded.

It took me some time, but I did everything he said. Soon I started looking out my window and seeing the world again. And not too much later, I showed up at the shop and went to find my brother.

He smiled when he saw me, like he knew why I’d come and what I was thinking. “Do you think…” I said, in a quavering voice. “Do you think I could help out around here somehow?”

He clapped me on the back. “Sure you could. Sure you could.” He handed me a wrench. “Welcome aboard. Come with me and, I’ll show you how it’s all done.”

I never got the chance to tell him how grateful I was for that.

He saved me, over and over again, and taught me how to stand and face fear. I didn’t deserve his help, but he gave it to me anyway. There’s no way in hell I’d I abandon him now in his hour of need. He was right, always. The worst thing you can do is run away from your fear. You stand and fight. That’s how you become a better person. That’s how you make a life for yourself worth living.

All right, I think, as the ghosts close in on me. Just like you taught me. I hold my nozzle at the ready.

Eat vacuum, motherfuckers.

I dive behind the piano as the largest one lunges at me. There’s another nasty jangling of keys as he crashes into the instrument. Another one, big and red with grotesque fangs, swoops overhead to come at me from above. But I roll onto my back and gouge him in the face with my beam of light. He roars. I rev the machine up, and I’ve got him. I push myself up against the wall and hold on for dear life as he strains against the pull. There’s a shudder, and then I know I’ve got him.

Then I leap out from behind the piano, brandishing my flashlight beam as a blade, carving away at the startled ghosts. Each step is another swing, another pulse of pain, and each brings me closer to them, until I can see their howling mouths, their warty faces, and their bulging eyes. I ram the power on the vacuum up to max, and catch them both in the vortex. Each tries to pull away, tugging in opposite directions and dragging me about the room, but I match their every twist and turn. Dust blows about the room, papers fly everywhere, but they’re mine. And with a last furious scream, they’re gone.

I wait a moment and see if anyone else feels like dropping in, but nothing happens. I relax and start looking for the breaker. Before long I’ve got power running to the room again. It’s an easy fix—ghosts are lousy saboteurs. The lights are on, and I take a look around.

Then I spy something familiar lying on the floor near the piano, looking like it had been blown about in the fight. A bright flash of red. I go over and pick it up. It’s my brother’s red cap, with our family logo on it. The one he always wore while he was at his work. I’d recognize it anywhere. And it looks clean.

My heart lifts. He’s here somewhere. I haven’t been searching in vain.

And from the looks of things, he may not be far away.

I look across the room. On the far side lies another door. And beyond that room lie further dark chambers, attics and hallways and basements crawling with ghosts. That’s where I need to go.

 _I’ll find you there,_ I promise him. _I’ll find you._

I go over to the door. I turn the key. I push it open.

And into the darkness I go.


End file.
